Pegasystems Takes Customer Service Far Afield

Pegasystems earlier this week launched Pega Field Service, an application designed expressly to streamline and automate critical components of field service operations. The software's key components are a customer service dashboard and a mobile application that enables organizations to centralize distributed field service work.

The company's decision to home in on the field service industry is predicated in part on the cross-vertical use cases the sector encompasses. Field agents in virtually any vertical, from insurance claims adjustors to in-home mortgage bank inspectors, can utilize a centralized method of unifying data with home offices to provide more efficient service, thus enhancing customer experiences.

Pega Field Service keeps track of all aspects of the field service process, from initial call responses to follow-up visits and communications to ensure customer satisfaction. The customer service dashboard provides agents with comprehensive access to interactions throughout a customer's entire history with a particular organization.

The software is equipped with a management control panel that supervises the scheduling and dispatch work of customer service representatives, allowing upper level management to discern every step of the process in engaging with a particular customer.

"Many businesses still think of field service as a cost center to their business, but the reality is that when done right, it can actually be a profit center," said Steve O'Brien, senior director of product marketing at Pegasystems.

"With customer expectations reaching new heights, an intelligently executed field service interaction can enhance the customer experience to drive deeper loyalty and sales," he told CRM Buyer.

Mobile Application

Some of the product's more prominent features pertain to its mobile application and the various deployments in which it engenders value. The solution's predictive analytics functionality facilitates its guided interactions for representatives. Thus, field agents continually have updates about how to proceed, based on the most recent data provided to their companies.

Additional characteristics of the mobile application include complete integration with desktop versions to unify access and lineage for a specific account. Mobile apps facilitate the scanning of bar codes, which is pivotal for managing equipment and parts.

Other features include digital signature capture, which plays an integral role in determining at what precise point various aspects of fieldwork are completed.

Offline Services and More

Another notable aspect of Pega Field Service is its increased offline capabilities, which are linked to various facets of the Pega 7 platform -- Pegasystems' flagship offering, which is essential to most of its solutions.

Specifically, Pega Field Service enables agents to utilize more copious amounts of data while in offline mode than they previously were able to access without an Internet connection. Such functionality increases autonomy, as well as the types of jobs an agent can perform while utilizing the solution.

Other features include a greater selection of touch-based interactions and capabilities to complete certain fields automatically.

Additional Utility

Pega Field Service is also valuable as a means of cleansing data and clarifying the meaning of terms, some of which might have different spellings for words that denote the same things, due to differences in representatives' input methods.

"What we do is we take in all these different combinations of customer names, then we transport that and map it to a CRM output that we get from the CRM system from the customer," noted Puneet Pandit, CEO of analytics vendor
Glassbeam.

"Then we cleanse all that and take one customer name," he told CRM Buyer.

The projected boons of Pega Field Service most importantly include cost reductions. By providing organizations with a way of monitoring all aspects of field service visits, the solution helps them ensure that the process is streamlined and tailored to the specific needs of customers. That in turn is instrumental in providing better customer experiences.

The platform also allows organizations to improve communications between home offices, agents and customers, which should benefit performance and increase customer satisfaction. Greater levels of efficiency also should translate into the successful completion of more service visits, which would correlate with greater revenue.